> -----Original Message-----
> From: rake-devel-bounces at rubyforge.org> [mailto:rake-devel-bounces at rubyforge.org] On Behalf Of Charlie Savage
> Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 11:31 AM
> To: Rake Development and Discussion
> Subject: Re: [Rake-devel] Building native extensions with Rake
>> Hi Luis,
>> > I'm working on a series of tasks that ease the compilation
> of Ruby C
> > Extensions with Rake. The goal of these tasks are ease the building
> > and compilation of Ruby C extensions, also looking into be
> > merged/integrated into Rake.
>> I really like the idea, but I don't think this is the right
> way to do it. The fundamental issue with building extensions
> is Ruby's assumption that the compiler used to build ruby
> itself is the same as the one used to build an extension. On
> Windows, with MingW and VC++, that is often not the case.
> Adding a few rake tasks doesn't solve the problem, so doesn't
> make anything any easier.
>> In my view, the real solution is to port Python's DistUtils
> to Ruby and using it as the standard way of building ruby
> extensions. Distutils takes a much more object oriented
> approach than mkmf, so is a lot more flexible. This
> flexibility allows it to support multiple compilers, and from
> limited experience, it works quite well.
>> I don't know if the community would be interested in such a
> big change, but I think it would be a big leap forward for
> Ruby and extensions.
Implementing an mkmf replacement was tried a while ago:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/mkmf2/
But it never caught on. But gems are more pervasive now, so maybe if it
was gemified, we could take another look. However, I don't think it was
ever trying to be a distutils replacement.
Porting distutils may be the answer, though. You volunteering? ;)
Regards,
Dan
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